Deana Lawson’s photographs are inspired by the materiality and expression of black culture(s) globally. Her work negotiates a knowledge of selfhood through a profoundly corporeal dimension. Lawson’s pictures speak to the ways that sexuality, violence, family, and social status may be written, sometimes literally, upon the body. Lawson utilizes a wide range of photographic languages, including staged imagery, appropriated pictures given to her by subjects, and images she discovers in public media.

“ What you see in her work is photographer as cultural anthropologist but also as cultural vivisectionist and forensic curator. Her practice subtly contests the suppression of Black visual epistemologies--as much through absence as presence, withheld information as much as cultural saturation bombing. Drawing the spectators eye to how people command space within the frame, how they proclaim ownership of selfhood before the camera is a recurring motif. Her work seems always about the desire to represent social intimacies that defy stereotype and pathology while subtly acknowledging the vitality of lives abandoned by the dominant social order. ” Greg Tate, Writer & Musician 2011

Deana Lawson's work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, Rhona Hoffman Gallery, PS1, and Studio Museum in Harlem. Her photographs have been published in The New Yorker and Time Magazine, and Lawson was a feature presenter for the 2013 National Geographic Magazine’s Photography Seminar in Washington, D.C. Recently Lawson was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, expanding her locations of work to include Jamaica, Haiti, and West Africa. Deana Lawson is currently a Lecturer in Photography at Princeton University. Lawson received an M.F.A. from RISD in 2004.